


Three of Cups

by Laylah



Category: Persona 3
Genre: Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 17:16:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Not here. This is a rotten place for reunions." He hops down from the ledge and holds out his hand. "Do you trust me?"</p><p>[ending spoilers, not FES-compliant]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three of Cups

Sie is many; in the passage of time sie has been-is-will be all things. It is hir nature to absorb, to contain multitudes, to quiet the restless motion of souls and let them pass through hir, through hir realm -- for they are much the same -- and start anew. But hir presence in this place, in this time, is fractured, and only now knitting back together, as dusk heals the fracturing of light. For hir selves to have independent desires -- for hir to have selves at all -- is not hir usual state. It will heal with time; all that is changes as time stretches on, and sie will be many things before sie becomes the end of all things.

So if one facet of hir retains a will, for now, a sense of self-ness, sie is not, cannot be, troubled. All things return to hir eventually, restored to hir as they attain their own completion. The ripple within hir that waited inside a human soul, and then borrowed human seeming, now pulls away from hir, shrinking into an individual once more. Sie does not protest. It is well. All is well.

*

He has a shape. He has a face. He has a name. All he needs is to remember them and he can have them back. He pulls, drags the darkness closer until it coalesces, until it makes him a boy again instead of nothing. Until it makes him Ryoji. He wraps his memories, his self, around the name and holds on until it's true.

It was fun, being human. He wants to go back.

There are a lot of people in Nyx's confines who feel that way. It seems death is not an easy change, for many of them. Where those souls hang in the firmament, the darkness gives way around them, their memories forming homes for them, places they remember from life. Here Ryoji drifts through the grounds of a quiet shrine, there the gleaming white halls of a palace, and further on he finds a tiny fragment of the heart of a star, home to the salamander who still dreams of it. Some of the memories are bright and recent, still solid, and others are fading around the edges as the souls who made them slowly forget enough to be able to move on.

He could make places like this himself, Ryoji thinks. He's human enough, and there are a few places -- the classroom, of all things, and that room in the Iwatodai dorm -- that he remembers clearly enough. But he isn't human, really -- well, no soul is human itself; the important thing is, he already knows it. And he's looking for something in particular.

The place surrounding her looks like a hospital room, but it's blurry. Not so much like she's fading, not yet, but more like...she put up the room just so she'd have _somewhere_, sketched it in hastily with her attention on other things. She sits in the hospital bed with her eyes closed and holds on with both hands to the scarlet cord that snakes out from her chest, glowing, into the darkness. And she must know he's there, because she frowns when he shows up, but she doesn't open her eyes or say hello.

Ryoji sits down on the windowsill of her imaginary room -- he has to balance carefully, because it's less real than he is right now -- and smiles at her. "You miss him like crazy, don't you?"

That makes her open her eyes, and glare. "Of course," she says. The cord glows bright between her hands.

"You want to see him again?" Ryoji asks.

Her eyes widen for a second, like she thought nobody would ever offer, and then she grips the cord tighter. "Don't bring him here," she says. "Let him have his time."

Ryoji shakes his head, still smiling at her. "Not here. This is a rotten place for reunions." He hops down from the ledge and holds out his hand. "Do you trust me?"

She stares at him for a long moment, and then she pushes back the blanket with one hand, the other still wrapped around the cord. Not letting him go. Good. "Yes," she says quietly, seriously, like the spell it is, and takes Ryoji's hand.

*

"Here," the boy says, and pulls Chidori close, stretching out his other hand to take hold of the tether that keeps her close to Junpei. Power hums through the tether as soon as he touches it, and then it _tugs_, and Chidori stumbles forward. The boy slides his arm around her waist, and their hands nearly touch where the both hold the tether tight. "Come on," he says, and takes a step.

Chidori takes a step to match him, and then another, and then her own dull little purgatory falls behind, and they're walking -- running -- flying through the dark, the red shine of the tether stretching on in front of them. Air rushes past Chidori's face, and she thinks she can hear the boy laughing as they move, past the other dead, the legions of souls who all wait here lonely and grieving. The air tastes cool and sweet, like twilight in the spring. Chidori can feel a pulse coming back to her along the tether now: the beat of his heart.

"Junpei," she says. She wants her own heart to quicken, to match that pulse.

"Yeah," the boy says, close by her ear. He sounds breathless. "Almost there now. Hold on tight."

There's light up ahead, lavender blue, where Junpei's heart leads them, and the wind rushes past faster, louder, almost like it's trying to push them back but they can't stop now -- and then there's solid ground under Chidori's feet, so suddenly that she stumbles, catching her breath -- her _breath_ \--

She bursts out laughing from sheer surprise, and her own laughter sounds so strange to her ears that she claps a hand over her mouth. The boy laughs, too, his smile as reckless as Junpei's, his eyes wide and blue.

"I thought that would work," he says.

They're standing in an alley; she can hear music from somewhere nearby, and when she looks down toward the alley's mouth she can see the splashing water of a fountain. "Paulownia Mall?" she asks, looking at the boy. Of all the places to return --

But he nods. "He should be around here somewhere," he says. "Right?"

Chidori pauses. She can't see the tether anymore, but when she closes her eyes she can still feel it, knows which way it pulls. "Yes," she says. "Very close by."

"Great." The boy takes her hand again. "What are we waiting for?"

*

Thursday's usually a pretty good night for karaoke, even if the school break means that there are more people around than usual. Junpei's waiting his turn -- he's a nice guy, he can let the junior high girls go first. They probably have curfews or something, and he doesn't have to worry about that.

They blush and giggle when he waves for them to go ahead, and he thinks that a year ago he'd have given just about _anything_ for girls to look at him like that. Even junior high girls. And a year ago, none of them would have. It's crazy how much difference a year makes.

And then the short hairs on the back of his neck stand up all at once, in a way they haven't since the Dark Hour ended -- only not like that, really, because this is unnerved in a good way, for all the sense that makes, and Junpei tries to act casual about it in case there's actual trouble, but slowly, real calm, he turns around.

He sees them standing there by the door and starts toward them instantly, squeezing through the crowd. It's instinct. He'll be wrong when he gets there, no way it could be either of them, much less both, but the crowd parts again and they still look like themselves from closer up and they turn and --

"Junpei!" Chidori says.

And Ryoji says, "There he is!" right at the same time.

And then people get out of their way so they can reach each other, and Junpei just has enough time to see that they're holding hands, not enough time to even stop and get upset, wonder what that's about, before they reach him and then it's -- it's kind of a collision, actually, where they both try to throw themselves at him and so everybody's arms get tangled up and Junpei almost falls over but that's okay. His eyes sting, which is lame and stupid and he doesn't _care_, because the part about saving the world, right, is that _then you get to live happily ever after_, and you can't do that without your -- without the people who matter to you.

He pulls back just enough to see their faces, and Ryoji's beaming and even Chidori -- Chidori is smiling at him and she looks so good that it hurts to breathe and Junpei thinks, _I never said it back to her_, only if he says it here maybe she won't hear him over the karaoke and he'd feel silly if he had to repeat himself. But he leans in and kisses her, before he can talk himself out of that, and her hand tightens in his shirt and her mouth is soft and warm and Ryoji doesn't let go either. And that should be weird, only it isn't.

"Hey," Ryoji says after a minute, "me, too."

Junpei looks over at him and is probably going to say something like _man, get your own girlfriend_, only Ryoji kisses _him_ before he gets the chance. And -- that -- oh. That's more than he ever expected. He's probably making a stupid face when Ryoji pulls back, but Ryoji's grinning and Chidori doesn't look upset and it's okay.

Ryoji leans in like he's going to do it again, though, and Junpei shakes his head. "Are you crazy?" he says. "People are already staring."

"Oh," Ryoji says, like he doesn't know any better -- well, of course he doesn't, he's -- Junpei decides not to think about that.

"So," he says instead, "we should go somewhere else." He takes their hands -- both of them, because people are staring already, so why not? -- and they let him. "The dorm okay with you?"

"Sure," Ryoji says, and Junpei looks at Chidori and she smiles, and it's good. Everything, just -- everything is good.


End file.
